Oracle in the Post Office
Jeremy Clarke
The late Douglas Adams once said: 'I love writing to deadlines. I particularly enjoy listening to the sound they make as they go whooshing by.' The deadline for my piece on the history of the kerbstone had whooshed by a good hour ago. But the article was now finished, sort of, and 1 printed it off and jogged with it up to the Post Office and General Stores, where there is an ancient but generally reliable fax machine.
The place was overflowing with grockles. The queue for the till snaked right round the shop. Behind the till the two Margarets were working like acrobats. Twenty minutes to reach the counter by my reckoning, plus another 15 to send the fax. Too long. Judging by her tone of voice, the editor was already doing star jumps. I stood in the doorway and rubbed my chin with the palm of my hand and tried to remember if anyone else in the village owned a fax machine. In doing so I dislodged a scab on my chin where I'd cut myself shaving and made it bleed.
Then Edna came up, arms outstretched, wig askew, puckering up for a kiss. I seem always to bump into Edna in the Post Office. I know her only by sight and by touch. Who she is exactly, I couldn't say, except she's about 80 and likes to kiss all the boys. 'Careful, I might bleed on you,' I said as our lips met. After a lingering kiss I withdrew my face and saw that a drop of my blood had transferred itself from my chin to hers. I pointed it out. 'Can I keep it?' she said.
There are three detached houses between ours and the Post Office and General Stores. I stopped at each one and asked if there was a fax machine I might use. The elderly, cultured spinster living in the first house came to the door with a crooked forefinger between the pages of a book of Georgian poetry. The words 'fax machine' — or perhaps my supposition that she might own such a thing — made her skeletal shoulders shake with laughter.
At the second house, except for a few contented ducks there was no one at home. The man standing in the front garden of the third house, however, thought there might be a fax machine somewhere in the house. He didn't actually live there, he said. The house belonged to his lady friend. But he thought he might have seen one in one of the bedrooms.
He was standing in front of a lawnmower with a powerful-looking petrol engine. Before we went inside to look, he asked, would I mind starting his mower? At 92 years of age, he said, he no longer had the strength to pull the starting cord. 'Ten years ago, mind . .' he said. I gave the cord a yank and the mower roared into life, drowning out the old man's recollection of the past. He sprang gratefully behind the controls and stumbled courageously after it. I waited patiently in case he remembered about the fax machine. But the roar of the engine, the smell of the petrol, and the total mental and physical effort required to keep the mower under control had erased it from his memory.
I returned to the Post Office, but the queue for the till was longer than ever. This time, I was caught by a retired bookmaker, Reg. Reg has heard a rumour in the village that I am some kind of journalist. I flatly deny it, of course, but, after a lifetime of thinking the worst, Reg gives this rumour more credence than my personal refutation of it. Worse still, Reg thinks that journalists are more wellinformed about the world about us than the average man and woman in the street, and treats me like some kind of Oracle. He'd seen the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games on TV and been very impressed by it all.
'So how much does it cost. then, the Olympic Games?' he said. I had a fleeting mental image of the editor who was waiting for my copy taking part in the synchronised diving. 'Billions,' I said. 'What, tens of billions, hundreds of billions, or thousands of billions?' Millions of billions, Reg,' I said gravely. He paused for a moment and tried to envisage such a sum. Then he said, 'So what are all these bloodstained bits of paper you've got in your hand?'
Reg had a fax machine, as it turned out, and was happy to show me how to use it. I told him the sheets of paper were a letter to an Aunt who lives on the Isle of Dogs. 'That's a good one, that is.' he said. 'Scotch?'
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